By Jnanendra Das
If you’ve checked your inbox or WhatsApp last week, chances are you’ve been hit with another “Black Friday Sale” message. But what’s Black Friday, and why is it the global Hunger Games of shopping?
Black Friday, falling on November 29 this year, is the Friday after Thanksgiving when brands worldwide (yes, even Indian ones) roll out discounts so massive that they could make your budget-conscious dad weep tears of joy—or rage if you max out his credit card. For those earning a salary, having the sale land at month-end feels like a cruel joke, doesn’t it?
But how did it start? And why associate “black,” usually a sign of doom, with the thrill of bargain-hunting?
The popular belief is that the term Black Friday derives from the once-common accounting concept that businesses operate at a financial loss, or are “in the red,” until the day after Thanksgiving when massive sales for the Christmas holiday season (in the West) finally allow them to turn a profit, or put them “in the black.” Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be “in the red”, instead of taking in the year’s profits. The earliest known published reference to this explanation occurs in The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 28, 1981. But this theory about today’s Black Friday is about as accurate as calling every WhatsApp forward real news.
Historically, black has been associated with days of economic stress as opposed to days of booming commercial success. As per the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the first Black Friday on record occurred on September 24, 1869, after Wall Street financiers Jay Gould and railway businessman James Fisk attempted to corner the US gold market at the New York Gold Exchange by buying as much of the precious metal as they could, with the intent of sending prices skyrocketing. On Friday, September 24, intervention by President Ulysses S. Grant caused their plan to fall apart. The stock market instantly plummeted, sending thousands of Americans into bankruptcy. Happy Black Friday!
In the 1950s, it wasn’t gold but sick notes: workers suddenly “fell ill” the Friday after Thanksgiving, creating the world’s first unofficial four-day weekend. As per Encyclopedia Britannica, the true origin of the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday lies in the sense of black meaning “marked by disaster or misfortune.” In the 1950s, factory managers first started referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving as Black Friday for the sick leaves.
Ten years later, Philadelphia traffic cops borrowed the term to describe the post-Thanksgiving chaos when shoppers flooded stores—and they had to endure 12-hour shifts managing gridlock. Visitors flocked to the city to start their holiday shopping and, sometimes this popular shopping day coincided with the annual Army-Navy football game. Retailers eventually embraced the term, because hey, nothing says “shop till you drop” like a day named after a disaster. From there it took off nationwide.
Fast forward, and Black Friday has become a global sensation, inspiring spinoffs like Cyber Monday (online deals), Small Business Saturday (local shops’ moment in the spotlight), and Giving Tuesday (to balance out all the greed). But it’s not all fun and games—shoppers have turned the event into a contact sport, with shoving matches, crowd crushes, and friendships lost over the last discounted TV.
Even though this concept emerged in the West, with the world becoming a global village, Indian retailers are not lagging and also, who needs cultural alignment when there are discounts to be had? In India, most of the holiday shopping season has traditionally been aligned around the “festive period” of major festivals usually falling around October or November, such as Diwali. As the waves of shopping sprees moved online after the global pandemic, there are now Pink Friday Sales and Big Billion Days around the corner offering deals.
So, as you contemplate whether you really need a snail mucin bottle, remember: Black Friday isn’t just a sale—it’s you versus them. Good luck out there.
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